Mr. President, Your White Supremacy Is Showing

According to Trump, immigrants from Haiti and African countries come from "shitholes."

Donald Trump often struggles to remember what he supports when it comes to the nitty-gritty details of policy. But no matter how confused or angry he gets, he manages to hang on to the broad strokes that seem to drive most of his decisions: America is for white people only.

According to a new report from The Washington Post on Thursday, in a meeting on immigration, President Trump dropped what little pretense he had about what kind of immigrants he thinks should be allowed in.

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met yesterday.

Trump doesn't seem to understand or believe that individual people choose (or are forced) to migrate. What the president keeps describing is a system where governments shuffle people around based on some non-existent dollar value, and the U.S. should be acquiring specific nationalities as though they were stocks. It's also hilarious that Trump can't wrap his head around why people from Norway, the happiest country in the world, with a robust social safety net and nationalized health care, wouldn't want to move here.

But of course, even if the president had a basic grasp of how immigration worked, on literally any level, that wouldn't cover up how nakedly racist this is. And really, it's just a small step away from how racist he's already proven to be as president. We saw some of this already last December, when he allegedly said that all Haitians have AIDS, but the White House quickly came to his defense and denied it ever happened.

This time though, they're just rationalizing it. Like in this statement from the deputy press secretary: